It is an observable fact that some skin wounds leave scars while others heal leaving minimal scars or no visible scar at all. Even apparently serious wounds, such as a deeply cut finger or a puncture wound through the flesh, sometimes heal without leaving any scar detectable to the naked eye. In some cases, even the closest inspection only a short time afterwards shows no trace of the wound. To prove this assertion, it is sufficient to closely inspect one's own fingers where a cut was known to have occurred some time ago, and be unable to find a scar. This can also be demonstrated by stabbing a fleshy part with the point of a scalpel or lance, as is sometimes done by spring loaded lances used to produce bleeding for coagulation or blood sugar tests, and then attempting to find the cut area some two or three weeks later. Further, most clean needle injections leave no trace some time afterwards, although the skin was cut by the end of the needle (needle tips are constructed as small blades that actually cut the skin).
However, it is equally observable that some injuries and operations, such as surgical intervention for abdominal or thoracic problems, usually do leave unsightly and sometimes disfiguring scars. Scars from thyroid operations and breast reduction or enlargement surgery are seen as both practically inevitable and particularly unsightly. In most cases, coming out from a major laceration or surgical operation without a disfiguring scar is a rarity. It is an observable fact that in the case of many injuries and most operations, by the time the wound is closed and the skin joined back together, the edges of the skin have been handled or exposed to air for some time, often hours, and have long ago ceased to bleed, which indicates that the blood supply to the edges of the skin has been closed off. In effect, after a wound has been open long enough for the bleeding at the edges of the skin to have stopped naturally, the edges of the wound are bordered by dead tissue that is not receiving a blood supply.
In fact, it is almost always part of surgical procedure to “stop the bleeding” using various measures designed to stop the bleeding that does occur. These procedures can include cauterization (burning), which most definitely produces an area of dead tissue wherever it is applied to the wound. Thus, with accepted standard surgical practices, the edges of the skin opening that are not bleeding and hence are no long truly “alive,” are joined together when the wound is closed with stitches or staples. In the state in which the wound is left to heal, the finished repair often resembles a series of hills and valleys. Where staples are used, it is not even the dried edges of the skin that are held together, but the undersides of the two edges of skin, which do not normally touch one another (in the absence of such a procedure), that are held to one another by the staples. When a wound is left to heal in this state, a scar always does occur and is often dramatic. All too often, when the staples are removed, an unsightly ridge of fibrous tissue is left as part of the unsightly scar. Despite known situations in which skin openings can and do heal naturally and invisibly under certain circumstances, conventional medical wisdom accepts that other wounds cannot heal without leaving significant, permanent and often disfiguring scars.
Hence, there remains a need for an effective and inexpensive method and device by which skin openings, such as cuts, wounds and surgical incisions, can routinely be closed in such a manner as to create the conditions under which nature routinely proves its ability to produce scar-free healing.